


Cancer Café

by DumpsterDiving101



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bittersweet, Cancer, Chronic Illness, Coffee Shops, Dehumanization, Dissociation, Domestic Bliss, Domestic Fluff, Established Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Established Relationship, Everything Hurts, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Flowers, Fluff, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Orphans, POV Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Secrets, Sick Character, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 07:50:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17679389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DumpsterDiving101/pseuds/DumpsterDiving101
Summary: Steve has fleeting moments where he almost feels like a real person again.(Modern AU where Stucky is already established and pre-serum Steve only has a few years left)





	Cancer Café

**Author's Note:**

> This story is alternatively called "Human", but that's not as fun.

 The light beams draw streaks of white across the floor. The floor smells like varnish, thick and chemical, but also rich and old. The floor stretches along to meet the walls, which are painted in warm taupes, and the walls stretch to caress the ceiling, which is dotted with light fixtures. The light is warm, tinted yellow. There is light coming from the fixtures and the window, two different hues, but the room is still dim. You can walk through it and let the dimness lower your hues. You can walk through it and, as long as you never touch the streaks of light across the floor, never exist in the first place. 

 The entire house is designed as such, with the warm dullness, and the only variety from room to room is that some rooms are darker than others, and some are messier than others. The entire house is messy, from the rumpled clothes on the bedroom floor to the smears of toothpaste on the bathroom sink. It is lived in in a way Steve wasn’t sure he remembered. He had flashes of memory sometimes, flashes of moments where he existed, back when he existed. But despite the lingering nostalgia for a life he once had, he knows that even then he was on the precipice. Some days he existed. Other days, the days spent with the hospital sheets and the toilets reeking of bleach, the days spent with his feet covered in layers and his hands doughy with lotion, the days spent with blank walls and empty noise… those days, he transposed the physical realm. He existed as a child, at one point, but on those days he became something else, something inhuman. 

 That was in another life, another apartment. Now, he pads through this living building in socked feet, watching his step. He’s already memorized the spots where the floorboards creak and he avoids them with ceremony. Creaking means noise and noise means tangibility. It’s too early, he thinks, to be tangible. 

 Steve has already gotten himself ready for the day and is curled up on a kitchen chair when Bucky comes in, thoroughly mussed. His apartment is an amiable reflection of himself; dishevelled, but artfully so. Bucky is a real person, who wears clothes in muted colors that he picks straight from the clean laundry hamper. He is intriguing to watch, like the specimen of what Humanity supposedly looks like. Steve likes to perch, bird-like as he is, and observe the great mystery that is James Buchanan Barnes. 

 Bucky greets him with a grunt, not even glancing in Steve’s direction on his path to the coffee maker. Steve doesn’t drink the stuff, but he already turned the machine on. After he’d first moved in, Steve had started it once, just to see what would happen. What happened was some slightly happier grunts from Bucky. It was enough for him to make a habit out of it. 

 Steve swivels his head but not his body to watch. There is a routine to their motions, and even as Steve’s eyes are trained on Bucky’s face, pursed in concentration like a monkey digging in a tree, Steve can recognize the familiar sounds of his coffee: Formica countertop presenting ceramic mug, hot beverage poured into ceramic mug, aluminum spoon clinking against ceramic mug. Slurp. Bucky’s stubble scratching ceramic mug. 

 Steve comes back to himself for a moment, sipping from his own mug. It’s tea, the type that’s supposed to be good for his immune system. He drinks it because it tastes like nothing, but is better than water, and that way if anyone accuses him of attempting suicide-by-neglect, he can raise his thermos to them. 

 A few sips of coffee later and Bucky is starting to resemble a man instead of a monkey. Steve doesn’t care much either way— he teases Bucky for being an ape all hours of the day, not just in the morning— but he does smile at the familiarity of it. 

 Steve has an early start, so he infiltrates the bathroom while Bucky is brushing his teeth. He hugs him from behind, then gropes him unabashedly, just to be a little shit, and ducks out. He has his ageing phone, his skimpy wallet, and his prudish keychain. The keychain used to just be a key until Bucky saw it and bought him a laser pointer to clip to it. Steve still doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with a laser pointer, but he likes shining it on Bucky’s forehead when he’s not paying attention. Bucky will bustle around the café, his apron already stained with artisanal rosemary lemonade, and Steve will be sitting at his normal spot at the counter, shining the laser dot on Bucky’s forehead to distract his customers. Sometimes, he’ll get sloppy and accidentally shine it in his eyes, which makes Bucky blink and look in his direction. Steve will go back to his book quickly, sipping his tea as if he’d never even heard the word “mischief”.

 Sometimes during Bucky’s breaks, he takes Steve on walks. They intertwine their hands and Steve has his keyswalletphone pressing in his pockets, his shoes barely too tight, and the entire ensemble is enough to weigh him down, back to the ground. Bucky roots him in reality. Maybe it should be unpleasant, a balloon being tethered, but it’s not. Instead, he is a tuft of flowers that have grown in a plastic container all their life, and Bucky is the gardener who takes him out and roots him down. It is not confinement; on the contrary, being rooted down allows flowers room to grow. 

 If Steve was a flower, he would be honeysuckle. Not the colorful stuff, but the yellow-white ones, with the little spots like freckles. His stems would be thin and patched with brown with blood clots. If Bucky were a flower, he’d be a patch of tulips, pink and orange with a thick, sturdy stem. Tall, too; Steve’s mom has a long vase set aside just for tulips because it was okay to cut other flowers short, but it was a high crime to do the same to tulips. Some flowers, like honeysuckles, were allowed to be stunted. But not tulips. 

 Steve buys flowers, on the occasions that warrant them. He still sees a doctor once a season, just to make sure the estimated date is unchanging, and afterwards there is nothing like buying a bouquet and displaying them in the center of the kitchen table. They last only three days before he tosses them, unable to stand the sight of the sickness spreading. If he leaves them alone for too long they become brittle and dry, and they lose their color, lose their pride, bending over like a boy with scoliosis. Beautiful things, flowers. Steve likes that they’re cut down in their prime, displayed morbidly like death-mask centrepieces. 

 At the ripe age of twenty-six, Steve has had his last rites a whopping six times. It would have been more, but after his mother was affectionately murdered by fraudulent health insurance, he converted. He is now blessedly Baptist. Believing in a God who loves unconditionally and requires nothing in return feels like bittersweet naïveté sometimes, but it’s a price Steve is willing to pay for peace of mind. He’s not a good Christian, but he’s an effortful one. He tries to be if not good then kind. He prays, in the early hours of the morning and the late ones at night, the rosewater scented 10 o’clock drabbles, the afternoons tinged with grilled asparagus. He reads his stories and he prays, he drinks his tea and he prays. He watches Bucky, flirting with customers, smacking Sam around with a rolled up towel, falling asleep in front of the tv, strands of hair getting caught in his open mouth, and Steve prays, thanking God, despite the bitter edges. He hasn’t stayed in one place for so long since his mom died. Ever since then, Steve had been on the move, constantly, finding a city to claim and calling it his own, like a dog raising its leg to a stop sign. Steve had had a rule: no staying in one place for more than a year. He had so few years left.

 Steve had a little datebook where he kept track of things. When he decided to start renting in Moab, he flipped ahead a year and circled the date he’d have to be gone by. Then Bucky had happened, and as the months passed they started their little dance, then moved in together like two lovesick fuckin’ teenagers, and all the while that date just drew closer and closer. It hung over Steve’s head like a snowdrift, always waiting, always threatening. He was used to the loom of physical death, but this was something else. Watching that fateful date grow closer was like watching a tidal wave roll up to him, growing bigger and bigger each moment. Then it was upon him, the wave so big it blocked out the sun. 

 Bucky found his book on the day Steve was supposed to leave. Something about the rough red circles must’ve seemed ominous to him; go figure. “Steve?” He called. “What does this mean?”

 Steve walked over, hands shaking. It was probably just the anxiety meds; the dosage changed fucking constantly. It couldn’t have been anything more. “Oh,” Steve had said, “That just means it’s time to take out the composting.”

 Bucky looked at him, trying to figure out the lie. “Okay.”

 “Yeah, I just think it’s important to remember,” Steve said with a too casual shrug, yanking the datebook back and not-so-subtly cradling it to his chest. “We take the compost out every other Thursday, and don’t you forget it.”

 Bucky didn’t drop the confused look, but he did manage a convincing “Okay.” He didn’t mention that Steve didn’t have any other Thursday’s circled, just that day. “Yeah, sure. Do you want me to take it out?”

 “Please.” 

 So Bucky took the compost out and Steve stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And, in a fit of righteousness, set the datebook ablaze. Then put it out, because dammit, he’d scheduled his next appointment in there and he couldn’t afford to miss it. 

 Bucky never asked him for the truth, which Steve appreciated whole-heartedly. He struggled enough, pretending to be a solid, physical human on the daily. He couldn’t stand an actual human pointing out the cracks where the light streamed out. His act was only convincing as long as Bucky let it be. As soon as Bucky asked why he circled dates in his planner, or why he took so many meds or drank so much tea, Steve would be revealed for what he was: subhuman, a passing breath, there for a moment and gone the next. 

**Author's Note:**

> The best way to encourage my writing is to comment and let me know what you liked :) If you'd this to become more than a oneshot then please tell me!
> 
> [Psychotic Opera](https://youtu.be/gRvsxQDPlFM) by Small Leaks Sink Ships


End file.
